Gordon H. Clark, Logic, pp. 122-124

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Lance G. Marshall
Pastor
Georgetown, Indiana

Given the incomprehensibility of God, the possibility of man knowing what God knows can only be predicated on the understanding that the truth has been accommodated so as to be knowable by human capacity. Any denial of this fact involves man in rational idolatry.

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Yours sincerely,


"Illum oportet crescere me autem minui."

Would this imply a qualitative difference in the propositions that man and God know?

Would 1+1=2 mean something different to man than to God? If so, how, and how does that not entail skepticism?

I guess I'm just not seeing the distinction you're making here. It is fairly clear that, in some sense, the proposition we have in our mind must be present somewhere in God's mind for us to know it.

__________________
Ben Maas. . . . .Facebook
In college, attending First Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), Ada, OH, and
Belle Center Reformed Presbyterian Church (RPCNA), Belle Center, OH
When at home, attending Covenant Presbyterian Church (OPC), Mansfield, OH

“Prayer is as natural an expression of faith as breathing is of life.”
-Jonathan Edwards-

Ben, note Matthew's careful phrasing: "predicated on the understanding that the truth has been accommodated so as to be knowable by human capacity. . . ."

1 + 1 = 2 means exactly what God would have us to understand it means. The concept is the same to God and to Man, but God's understanding of everything entailed in that expression is far more vast than ours. In the realm of counting, 1 + 1 = 2, but in the realm of marriage, for example, God tells us that 1 + 1 = 1.

In other words, the concept of unity and addition have greater depth and consequences than our finite minds can conceive on their own, yet what we do conceive, if true, comports with the truth as God would have us understand it.

__________________
Raymond Victor Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

Click to get: Board Rules -- Signature Requirements -- Suggestions?

Okay, that's what I was hoping to hear.

To reiterate: are you saying that since God knows 1+1=2 in the context of every other proposition in the world, it follows that He has a qualitatively deeper knowledge of that proposition than man?

Clark v/s Van Til all over again!

__________________
Bob, elder, RBC Louisville. 1689 LBCF

"... Of such also, or of those who make a credible profession of being such, all those particular churches consist, which constitute our Lord's visible kingdom. ... Consequently, all the subjects of His government must have spiritual dispositions, , and yield spiritual obedience- obedience proceeding from an enlightened understanding, an awakened conscience, and a renewed heart."- Abraham Booth 1788

Clark has a good critique of Rationalism you may want to listen to if you are gathering from that quote that he means anything you are asserting. If God's comprehension is different than ours then that leads to irrational idolatry. There would be no need for confessions, creeds, nor scripture for our Comprehension is not capable of understanding that of God's.

Grace and Peace,
seal

-----Added 6/15/2009 at 02:52:23 EST-----

What??? How do you suppose that it's Qualitative? Are we to think three friends who agree on everything are 1 since the Trinity is 1???...LOL... What God gives there in scripture of a man and woman being one is a proposition. Not him showing how more Qualitative his mind than our when it comes to math...LOL...We can all comprehend and understand completely what God means by a man and woman being One.

God's knowledge is infinitely more in quantity.

Grace and Peace,
seal

__________________
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Laymen/Christian Producer/Rapper
RCA, Tampa FL

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to prove with your examples of three friends agreeing and marriage, but for the record, I don't see a distinction between God's having a qualitatively deeper knowledge (in the sense I mentioned) and His having a quantitative difference in knowledge. I was going to make that point if I understood what Victor was saying.

I'm having a bit of trouble with "qualitative." I could just as easily describe it as quantitative.

Maybe an analogy might help with what I mean: A child can learn 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples. The child then learns that this applies to oranges as well. This is an abstraction that is earth-shaking for thought. The child then can apply the principle to counting any number of things.

But still, the child doesn't really understand what else is implied by 1 + 1 = 2. For instance, it will be a while before the child can understand that a series of 1 + 1s put into a mathematical expression, and then divided by the same series plus yet another "1" defines a powerful limit function. The mathematician who uses limit functions every day uses the basic addition proposition in ways that can boggle the mind.

In a similar fashion, God understands the full expression of 1 + 1 = 2, in all of its combinations and permutations, in the created universe without having to do any calculations at all. He set these things forth. So, yes, in that sense, his qualitative understanding of the proposition is much deeper. But in the sense of whether 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples, in a particular location, I don't see how there could be any qualitative difference.

Maybe I'm missing your question. I do think that there is a qualitative difference in how we understand propositions, but not in the propositions themselves. For example: God created us with an intuitive and innate capacity to abstract from observation: we add two items together and get a sum. We cannot, however, do that for every item in the universe. We must remain content with the knowledge that this is a universal truth that we cannot verify for ourselves in every case.

But God doesn't have to be content with this understanding. He knows of every item in the created universe and he can account for them without abstraction. So his understanding of the proposition is from the perspective of creating an order in which the proposition is true, whereas our understanding is derivitive of (1) observation of that order and (2) revelation.

Samething I was thinking. What is confessor trying to prove with marriage and the qualitative knowledge of God? A bit incompatible.

There is a clear difference and distinction between qualitative and quantitative knowledge. You can't say God has both and mean the samething for both definition can you?


Grace and Peace,
seal

Victor,

If you already agree that the "how" is qualitatively different whereas the "what" is only quantitatively different, then why would Clark be accused of rational idolatry?

-----Added 6/15/2009 at 03:14:33 EST-----

First, you can call me Ben.

Second, I didn't make the point about marriage.

Third, I agree that the objects of God's knowledge differs from man's only quantitatively. I am a Van Tillian, but I do not take everything CVT said as gospel.

Hmmmm...... Okay Ben, thanks. I thought you did but I may be mistaken again... Also, I didn't know you didn't take anything CVT said as Gospel. You're one of the first ones I've ran into to say it and still live....LOL....seriously though. Down here whenever I do visit a Presbyterian church I keep my Clarkianism to myself or risk being called a rationalist or Black Guy who thinks he's smart...LOL....

Grace and Peace,
seal

I didn't think he was being accused of rational idolatry, but rather that a cautious qualification should be observed.

I don't want to replay the old debate, because I think it got bogged down in turf-battles over definitions, but I can't recall where, if anywhere, Clark addressed the question of how God's decree of propositional truth is from a different perspective than ours, ie. he is the source and we are the recipient.

"Black Guy who thinks he's smart"

-----Added 6/15/2009 at 03:27:00 EST-----

I was referring to Rev. Winzer's mention above regarding "rational idolatry."

So was the charge against Clark in the "Complaint" that he didn't make the analogical nature of knowledge (God creates it and man discovers it, etc.) explicit enough?

I don't know, this seems to be a rather obvious thing that he would have believed. Was the problem that he didn't explicitly mention it?

At the obvious risk of a pile-on, since even Ben differs with me here, I would argue that, because of God's simplicity, if our knowledge coincided with his at any one point, then our knowledge would coincide with his at every point, and since our knowledge would coincide with God's -- again because of his simplicity -- we would be God.

We don't know things with the knowledge of the creator and source. We know derivatively and by reflection.

__________________
Clark Brooking
Pastor
Living Hope Presbyterian Church (OPC)
Clarksville, MD

I think that argument from God's simplicity would follow only if divine simplicity entailed that God knows only one proposition.

Keep in mind also that the "quantitative difference" advocates are pulling for a quantitative difference only regarding the objects of knowledge, not the entire process of knowledge, the "what" and not the "how."

Here is what I'm thinking on this matter. If I know my toe hurts, doesn't God also know my toe hurts. At that point don't we both know the same thing, i.e., my toe hurts. This doesn't mean I know everything God knows, but on that one point we both know my toe hurts. God's knowledge is more extensive, because He also knows why my toe hurts and how the pain will be resolved. Things I do not know. But isn't there at least one thing we both know in common - my toe hurts. Am I missing something here?

Your statement assumes that multiple propositions are independent and do not find unity in the knowledge of God.

Yes, Lance, I would say that is it. In a sense, God's knowledge is qualitatively deeper regarding the fact that your toe hurts, but nonetheless this "qualitative" difference is nothing else than a quantitatively "thicker" knowledge of all the propositions relating to the pain of your toe.

Thus I'd think it'd be a misnomer to say that the objects of God's knowledge are qualitatively different from the objects of man's knowledge.

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Clark,

That propositions find unity in God does not mean that we can't know part of that unity.

If we say that we can know a single proposition with as much depth as God knows it, then we would have to know the entire system and thereby claim to be God. But we're not claiming that. Knowing a proposition to some extent does not entail knowing it exhaustively, and we would have to know it exhaustively to know it in the context of God's unified knowledge -- but that doesn't mean we can know propositions non-exhaustively.

Interesting.

I got into it a bit with some Clarkians at my church (smart white dudes, not black dudes ) and they insisted that God's knowledge and man's knowledge coincide and are qualitatively the same though quantitatively different.

It would seem the Creator/creature distinction would be pretty much obliterated if this were the case.

In order for you to see why I am so vehemently defending a quantitative difference only, I'll have you look at this:

If God knows that 1+1=2, and if God's knowledge coincides at no point with man's knowledge (i.e. it is qualitatively distinct), then it follows that man cannot know that 1+1=2.

In other words, how does positing a qualitative difference in the objects of knowledge not imply skepticism? The concept of analogy must imply correspondence at some point. If man's knowledge does not correspond to God concerning the referent of knowledge, then where does it correspond?

Not being a philosopher, perhaps the following will be droll at least:

A good historian does not simply report facts, but traces those facts back to their causes and such. I may know that my toe hurts. But I don't know why (other than a sequencing of events). I don't know the ultimate cause (the decree of God) because it is incomprehensible to me. I may be able to string together some of the events that led to it, but I certainly cannot know the purpose for which my toe was stubbed or my nail grew inwards. Nor can I know any but the sensation of pain -- unless perhaps I'm a neurologist and can know some of the nervous explanation. But God knows my toe, me, my pain and its causes and ends in a wholly different manner than I do. And this is not divisible into propositions, but as the confession notes, his decree is singular (though, admittedly, the catechism wavers on this -- something by which I've always been intrigued).

-----Added 6/15/2009 at 04:40:43 EST-----

If the standard to evade skepticism is God's comprehensibility, then it does imply skepticism. But that's not my standard.

Yes there is a distinction between Creator/creature. But what can we say about the intersection of Deus/imago dei, which GHC would want to inject into the discussion?

Notice that in your describing the qualitative difference of God's knowledge, you are listing off (quantitatively) different facts that God knows in relation to the specific fact of toe pain. The allegedly qualitative difference is nothing more than a quantitatively "thicker" knowledge.

-----Added 6/15/2009 at 04:43:28 EST-----

Clark, you know that's not what i was saying. If God knows everything, and if man's knowledge coincides with God's at no point, then how can man know anything?

Note I did not attempt to establish the conditional proposition, "If God is comprehensible, then non-skepticism."

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To all,

Let me reiterate the point I touched on earlier: Analogy presupposes a measure of some correspondence and a measure of some discorrespondence. It is an amalgamation. Just as there are some attributes that are communicable from God to man, so also it is not prima facie destructive of the Creator-creature distinction to say that their difference in terms of objects of knowledge is only quantitative. Man knows the actual truth when he knows things, not an analogy of the truth (as Bahnsen himself said in Van Til's Apologetic).

Ok. But I know my toe hurts and God knows my toe hurts; do we know the same thing? (I've already acknowledged the issues of extensiveness).

Again, I'm not the philosopher that you are. But I may know every single event of the civil war. Yet I cannot fathom why it arose. I may be able to give some explanation in a limited context, but I cannot give you the purpose beyond the war. I may even be able to tell you positive and negative results that have happened since. But I could never tell you for what purpose Sherman burned Atlanta. The ultimate purpose of that is in the incomprehensible and singular counsel of God. If Romans 8:28ff teaches us anything, it ought to teach us humility with respect to the decree. The very idea that one act of evil can come about for the blessing of some and cursing of others -- all of which actions and their results are custom tailored -- is beyond the human imagination. And yet we are told it is so. For the want of a shoe the entire kingdom crumbles, and we may be able to string together some explanation, but the purpose lies beyond us.

There's a lot more there than I can deal with right now, not even counting my hazy recollection of the controversy. I would have to say that Clark was a bit extreme on the notion that man could discover truth. He would routinely say that man could not know truth without revelation, period, even going so far as to say that there was no learning of truth through observation.

Yet, he would freely admit that empirical endeavors, like engineeing and science, did discover things that work. So, when you are dealing with Clark, there is always that difficulty of dealing with his peculiar view of truth and knowledge.

For instance: one might say that he knows that water bubbling on a hot stove will burn you if you stick your hand in it. Clark might say, no, you can't know that for certain, unless scripture teaches it.

Contrast that with one who would say that we were created to undestand that the created universe is subject to physical laws that we can discover and apply. The laws as we describe them are not a priori but, instead, are summarizations of observation of an ordered universe. He would say that prior experience in the realm of touching boiling water leads to useful knowledge.

My take on Clark would be that he'd say, yes, the understanding of avoiding boiling water is useful, but it is not true knowledge. OK, fair enough for a technical argument, but is such a statement itself useful? My guess is that Clark would then say he had no use for usefullness as a criterion in discerning truth.

I have great appreciation for Clark when he is battling the irrationalists. I cringe a little, though, at his method of conducting his side of the debate. Having listened to a lot of lectures, I sometimes wonder if half the time he was being humorously impish in his provocative statements.

I can see why a pile-on is difficult now; I'm having trouble quoting and responding. So let me say this:

I'm not willing to put the ultimate cause, purpose, telos, or whatever you want to call it -- which is the singular decree of God, into the category of thickness or quantity. It is knowledge of a whole different order. It's the difference between why and what. Surely why is not a function of what.

Clark,

You're making good points about the limited extent of our knowledge-capacity, and I think that nicely demonstrates how God is incomprehensible.

But what I want to protect is the fact that some proposition X can mean the same thing to both God and man. Certainly God knows whatever man apprehends from it and more, but what I'm protecting is that man's knowledge is true (not analogous to truth) as far as it goes.

In other words, I'm trying to make sure we do not impinge on the Creator-creature distinction and make God's incomprehensibility null, yet we do not want to result in skepticism. We are searching for an appropriate middle ground.

This makes for an interesting discussion: is there a certain class of propositions which no man can ever find out? I think this is a very good point, but let's also keep in mind that this would imply there is another class of propositions (the "non-why") that man can know truly without knowing exhaustively.

-----Added 6/15/2009 at 05:03:13 EST-----

Victor,

I don't subscribe to Clark's Scripturalism. I think he makes some serious errors with that; hence I am a Van Tillian.

However, I think he was correct regarding the impossibility of a pure qualitative difference in all the objects of man's and God's knowledge. His basic argument goes: "If God knows everything and if man's knowledge never coincides with God at any point, then man can know nothing." And of course skepticism is antithetical to Christianity and our God of knowledge.

Though it's only an analogy (pun not exactly intended, but appreciated), seeing me in a mirror, would you say that you saw me? Sure you would. But you really only saw a reflection of me. You didn't see me directly. You would have true knowledge about me -- as mediated through the 2D medium of the mirror. Similarly, I'm not saying that knowledge of a painful toe is not true. Nor am I saying that God does not know that my toe hurts. But God knows my toe hurts in an entirely different way. He understands it in all its relations. Now you might call that a quantitative difference, but I would argue that infinity is not a quantity at all.

Would you say a doctor has a different qualitative knowledge about an illiterate man's toe pain than the illiterate? He know it in more relations than the illiterate would.

Even in the why category, we can know truly without knowing exhaustively. I know why Jesus died on a cross -- though my knowledge of this is true, it is not exhaustive. But even my knowledge of this why is not coterminus with God's knowledge of the why. Likewise, God knows that I ate a waffle this morning, and I know that I ate a waffle this morning (that rather than why). But the that knowledge of waffle-eating is not divisible from the why knowledge of waffle eating in the mind of God (because of simplicity), as it necessarily is in ours. His knowledge of my waffle-eating is infinite in scope. Mine is not. This is not a quantitative distinction.

Yes, there are things we will never know. We will never comprehend the trinity, the incarnation, etc. Once we delve into the infinite, it is beyond us. I guess I'm just trying to maintain a distinction between infinity and quantity.

-----Added 6/15/2009 at 05:11:18 EST-----

No, it's one more extensive knowledge when compared with another. That's quanitative. But infinite is not quantitative. It's qualitative.


I keep editing my yes and no here. Yes, it's qualitatively different. Yes it's quantitatively different. But even as qualitatively different as it is, it does not compare with the qualitative difference of God's knowledge of it.

Alright, we're just going back and forth on this.

I think if you'll just see what I asked about the doctor and the illiterate, we can be getting near a stopping point.

EDIT - Just saw that you did. I would say that infinity is actually the perfect concept in this case. It allows for God's incomprehensibility (because man is finite), yet retains that the difference is only quantitative. You have said that infinity implies a qualitative difference, but I don't think that is a tenable view. Infinity is used in math all the time as a quantity without having to resort to a separate qualitative "level."

whew . . . good.

I'd really like to discuss this more, but I've got other things going on too.

But one thing that strikes me about this conversation is the absence of considering time. I suspect that is where the real qualitative difference is.

God's thoughts are eternal, consistent, comprehensive, whereas ours are sequential. His revelation to us is also sequential, that would be what I think Matthew would call accomodation.

We can't think two separate thoughts at the same time--we have to consider one, then the other, and then back to the first. God's understanding is immediate. It is a difference in quality in that respect, not just quantity.



Just as an aside, Ben, I think your use of infinity as an abstract mathematical concept is not the same thing as the infinite aspect of God. Infinity is definable and reducable in mathematics, but, in a finite created universe, it has no actual analog. In other words, it is an imaginary shortcut for dealing with big numbers, just as calculus is a shortcut for dealing with what is observed in the physical world. (e.g. you can use integrals to figure out the area of a circle, but a real true-to-life circle will not have exactly the same area as one derived by infinitesimal integration because, at some point, particles making up the circle cannot be further divided--it will always be a polygon rather than a perfect circle). But that is all merely an aside.

Yes, I was including the matter of time in my initial posts about events. The why not only points backward but forward as well. And as God's knowledge of these events includes more than a higher number of events in its purview, but actually includes purpose, I would regard it as a qualitatively different knowledge. And, as infinity (or eternity in both directions as the human mind can only try to approximate) is no more a quantity of time than infinity is a quantity of number, again, it is a qualitatively different matter.

And yes, you've put your finger right on the matter of infinity as I was trying to push it. Thank you.

Good point about math.

Regarding the qualitative difference, I would point to what I said earlier: "But what I want to protect is the fact that some proposition X can mean the same thing to both God and man. Certainly God knows whatever man apprehends from it and more, but what I'm protecting is that man's knowledge is true (not analogous to truth) as far as it goes."

Yes, God knows in a different way than we do (intuitively rather than discursively), but we are discussing merely the objects of knowledge.

Keep in mind throughout this entire discussion, however, that there has to be some aspect of correspondence (and therefore some matter of quantity rather than quality) between man's and God's knowledge. Otherwise there would be no analogy, and skepticism would ensue.

Infinity is a good place to look for that correspondence to be seen in its proper light. We know what infinity is in one sense. But we can only conceive of it and speak of it as endless quantity. But that's not really what it is. God, on the other hand, knows infinity as it really is. Does that mean that our knowledge of infinity is untrue? No. Inadequate (for humanity)? No. Our limitations are appropriate to the creature. It is true because it corresponds to God's truth as condescended, adapted to the creature. Were we to try to claim to understand infinity as God understands infinity, then we would be making idolatrous claims.

Would we understand whatever limited knowledge we have of infinity as God understands that limited aspect?

We are running in circles a bit, aren't we. You know my answer to that.

Is that not akin to "can God build a rock too big for him to move?" God does not have a limited perspective. Now if you run to the incarnation, we're all going to be in a pickle. How can the infinite lay aside the prerogatives of deity? How can the omniscient one not know the times and seasons the Father has appointed? I can't answer these questions, because the incarnation, like the trinity, is beyond our finite understanding.

No we don't understand it the same. God does not have a limited subset of his limitless knowledge. Again, that would be to grasp infinity by way of the finite -- which is, the best we can do, of course. But therein lies the difference.